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Day three of the conference and I attended a comprehensive session on SharePoint security by Michael Noel. Now I wouldn’t normally heap praise on a session like this as security does tend to have the yawn factor and I for one struggle to keep awake on the subject of SP security so yes I did bring match sticks to keep my eyes open just in case..

Michael Noel comes from an infrastructure background so the session turned out to be quite interesting. A couple of key takeaways from the session were certainly to utilise the ‘Always On’ feature of SQL 2012 and the Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) features to encrypt your database backups. TDE is a very good feature available in both SQL 2008 and SQL 2012.

The key points from the session are detailed below in the five layers of SharePoint Security:

Layer 1 – Infrastructure Security: Use Kerberos instead of NTLM for numerous benefits like less hops for authentication. The search service account and content access account should be different as this will stop users seeing content they shouldn’t normally be allowed to see.

Later 2 – Data Security: Use Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) to encrypt the database. Note that the temp database will also be encrypted so you will need a separate SQL instance if only some of your content databases are required to be encrypted. If you use RBS then you can use bitlocker to encrypt the files on the file server. However, the data in memory is not encrypted.

Layer 3 – Transport Security: External or internal certificates are recommended if your SharePoint site is external facing. Be aware that there is a 20% overhead on your web servers when using certs. It is best practice to load balance Central Admin and use SSL. The traffic between your web servers and SQL is unencrypted so to encrypt this transport layer you will need to use IPSEC as it encrypts all packets between servers.

Layer 4 – Internet & SharePoint: SharePoint is not designed to be Internet facing without a degree of protection, so forefront unified access gateway (UAG) along with an ISO/Proxy server and your firewalls would need to be in place.

Layer 5 – Rights Management: AD RMS is a form of digital rights management (DRM) that is used to restrict activities on files.

I hope you found this interesting and you have some takeaways that you might use in your environment or even consider as an option in the future.